Covid Courses

Our support and condolences go out to anyone who lost family members, friends, or significant others due to the coronavirus. The Covid pandemic was hard on everyone: the various lockdowns, restrictions, as well as safety regulations to keep us healthy resulted in adjustments to our previous lives - most likely no one can truly remember a time before Covid, and no one will forget this experience.

Online Courses

Online courses were certainly a new experience for all of us - students and teachers, as well as parents/guardians. They taught us a lot about ourselves, our classmates, and teachers, and allowed us to improve our independent learning and time management skills. It may have been difficult to remain motivated and sane - but we supported each other the best we could and can all be proud of the work we have put in over these past two years. We would like to thank our teachers and the staff at NMS for organizing online courses and managing to make this experience a mostly positive one.

Online Class Bingo

To make online courses in our last semester more fun, a student in Abitur created a Bingo board of phrases said or situations that happen in class.

The goal of the game is to check off four phrases or situations in a row. If this is achieved, the participant calls out "Bingo" or another phrase that was given by the creator of the game.

German Covid Poetry

Poetry was the overarching topic of the last semester of the Abitur Q4 German course. Some Abitur students were tasked to write their own poems on the effects of the Corona pandemic. Here are their creations:

Finals Season

Abitur

As the finals were not cancelled for the previous year (Abitur 2020), it became clear to us students that our own finals would be written as well. However, we hoped that the possible difficulties of learning in Covid times would be taken into account while the exam questions and grading guidelines were being decided.

In the end, the exam time was increased by 30 minutes and the entire exam season was pushed back by two weeks. Furthermore, we were granted more intensive study days with our subject teachers, to go over specific topics that could be covered in the finals. Thanks to the teachers and heads of Upper Secondary School at NMS, we had more time to prepare, study and review with the aid of our teachers (if needed).

Our final season began with the presentation exams (5. Prüfungskomponente). This final is dependent on the research, preparation and presentation of each student. Therefore, many students stress (and procrastinate) the most for this final. Once the presentation exam was completed, we created study groups to help each other through the intense, as well as long study period that lead up to the written and oral exams. Depending on your choice of subjects, your three written finals could either take place in the course of 5 days or 5 weeks (both options having their pros and cons).

Now, we are all grateful that the finals season is over and are patiently waiting for the grades we worked so hard for. Furthermore, we can’t wait to celebrate our graduation during our planned festivities later this June!

IB

Due to the pandemic as well as the public reaction to IB grading in 2020 (when exams were globally cancelled), the IBO decided to implement a dual exam route in 2021. This meant that schools in countries that were able to safely and legally hold exams would do so, while other countries would be graded solely based on internal work (predicted grades, IAs, HL essays, etc.) - the IBO decided that this would be the fairest option.

Unfortunately for us at NMS, this situation meant we weren’t entirely sure if exams would take place (due to the uncertainty of the pandemic and communication between our school, the IBO, and the student body) - even in the weeks leading up to the exams. Furthermore, most of us felt unprepared for the exams, due to the difficulties of online learning and this uncertainty.

Alongside our dedicated studying, we spent the months before the exams contacting our school’s management, the IBO, the state of Berlin and Germany, and various media outlets, in an attempt to secure exam cancellation for our school. In the end, however, we bit the bullet and ended up writing exams anyways - trying our best and hopefully succeeding to some extent.

The teachers and staff at NMS put in a lot of work to ensure we felt more prepared, confident, and safe - and this work certainly does not go unappreciated! Many of us decided to defer exams to a later year or to retake specific courses, and many of us will most likely have to retake some of our exams, but all of us did our best and can be proud of the outcome of our hard work - no matter what!